Meet BlueJay the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner”

Consider BlueJay, the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is “Deep Web Intelligence” and whose board is populated with people like Admiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.

– From an excellent ArsTechnica article published yesterday

This past weekend, I highlighted the trend of the rapidly growing commercial spy industry and focused on a shadowy Italian company called Hacking Team. Today I have come across a different monitoring program called BlueJay, which is the product of a company called Bright Planet. Amongst other things, Bright Planet boasts that:

• BlueJay captures tweets from the entire Twitter firehose unlike all other products on the market.
• BlueJay is invisible and covert
• BlueJay captures geographically tagged tweets.

Here’s how it works.

More from ArsTechnica:

Recent leaks about the NSA’s Internet spy programs have sparked renewed interest in government surveillance, though the leaks touch largely on a single form of such surveillance—the covert one. But so-called “open source intelligence” (OSINT) is also big business— and not just at the national/international level. New tools now mine everything from “the deep Web” to Facebook posts to tweets so that cops and corporations can see what locals are saying. Due to the sheer scale of social media posts, many tools don’t even aim at providing a complete picture. Others do.

For instance, consider BlueJay, the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is “Deep Web Intelligence” and whose board is populated with people likeAdmiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.

Of course, once you have this basic data, you may want to do more with it. Say a suspect is tweeting from a GPS-enabled phone client and appears to be dealing drugs. Forget bothering with the paperwork needed to track the phone through a cell phone provider. BrightPlanet also offers GeoTime, a separate data visualization tool that can take exported BlueJay data and mine it to show where and when the target travels, what he tweets about at various locations, and where his phone resides at night. (BrightPlanet describes this as using “pattern recognition to automatically detect and annotate time-space behaviors, such as meetings, gaps, connections, clusters, and motion.)

Just another development we should all be aware of.

In Liberty,
Mike

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